Today, I’m going to let you in on a little bit of behind the scenes work here at Spring Lake. Renty and her husband Mike own and run Spring Lake. They’re an amazing couple to work with and they have a small staff of us who help with some of the behind-the-scenes magic you see, even though they do most of the heavy lifting themselves.
Well, I said all that to explain this. I was a wedding photographer in my former life (until I had a little boy and decided I needed to be home more). I also got married a few years ago, and I remember shopping around for a wedding venue. Now, I actually got married before I became a wedding photographer, but I still had an eye for design and desperately wanted beautiful wedding photos.
I spent hours pouring over photos from wedding venues. I looked for opportunities for gorgeous photos, and do you know what I found? The cost of a wedding venue had nothing to do with how beautiful the photos turned out. Some venues had amazing locations for photos and some didn’t. Some upscale indoor locations had dim lighting or artificial lighting in every photo. The colors were dark, vibrant and contrasting. And there were some inexpensive outdoor wedding venues that showed off gorgeous soft, beautiful, buttery, photos at every location.
I could tell just by looking through the wedding venue’s website if there was an opportunity for soft, glowy, buttery images. It was easy to tell because you can see the range across various photographers and their various styles of photography & editing. If the entire wedding photo collection from a venue is full of beautiful images, then it didn’t matter what level of photographer I chose. Even a novice can get awesome photos from a gorgeous location with amazing outdoor light.
And if you add that outdoor light to an open air barn (for beautiful photos even “indoors”) overlooking a lake that the sun sets over, you’ve got yourself a match made in wedding picture heaven.
Photography by Maloy Photography
If you look through photos taken of Spring Lake, you can see photographers using that sunset over the lake in all sorts of creative ways. Sometimes couples are sitting in our Adirondack chairs overlooking the lake, and sometimes couples are out on the lake during the golden hour. And sometimes, they’re hanging out in one of our fields for a soft, grassy, natural style.
